Melodic House and Techno is what happens when a huge room falls silent for thirty seconds. Ghostly leads, grooves built on sub weight, cinematic pads, and plenty of space left on purpose. The feeling is what pulls the track forward; the drums are only there to keep the clock running.
For reference, think Anyma, Massano, Colyn. The tempo lives at 120–126 BPM. Harmony stays basic, two or three minor chords in most tracks, and what keeps you listening is how the sounds change shape as they cycle through those chords.
Here’s how I build the four sounds that actually matter in Serum 2 (bass, lead, pads and plucks), followed by the arrangement and mix decisions that make all that space feel intentional rather than unfinished.
Start with the free pack
Grab the Free Serum 2 Melodic House and Techno Presets: 4 plucks, 4 leads, 4 basses, 1 pad and 1 synth. Every patch comes with an audio demo and everything is royalty-free. Unzip into Serum 2’s user preset folder, rescan, done.
The pack is aimed at people who already know how to write a progression and just need sounds that match what they hear in their head. The plucks pay off fastest: put one on a basic arpeggiated minor pattern and you’re instantly in the genre.
This is roughly the territory:
The sound, part by part
Bass
Always two layers. A clean sine sub that plays root notes and nothing else, plus a filtered saw above it handling the rhythm.
For the sub: one oscillator on a sine wavetable, unison 1, mono, filter left alone. Short attack, decay matched to your note lengths. That’s the whole patch.
For the top: saw, unison 2, detune 4, lowpass around 400 Hz with an envelope pushing roughly another 300 Hz of motion per note. Decay somewhere near 150 ms. Highpass it at 100 Hz so it stays out of the sub’s lane.
Why split them? Because now you can slam the sub with sidechain and barely touch the top layer. That’s the trick behind tracks that carry massive low end without any obvious pumping.
Leads
The lead carries the emotion. Begin with a saw or a wavetable with a slightly hollow character, unison 4 to 5, detune near 18 percent, and give it 30–60 ms of attack so notes don’t click.
Now the part that makes it sound like melodic techno rather than generic house: route a slow LFO to wavetable position: 4 bars per cycle, depth around 20 percent. The second time the melody comes around, the lead should sound a little different than the first.
Feed it into a reverb bus with a 4 to 6 second tail, then duck that bus against the dry signal so the wash only swells between notes. The melodic techno guide digs deeper into the lead patch itself.
Pads
Wide, slow, and more felt than heard. Unison 6, detune 20 percent, attack in the 1 to 2 second range, release at 3 seconds minimum.
Give the filter cutoff an envelope with a very long attack so the pad opens up as it holds. A second LFO on unison detune adds gentle drift. Highpass at 250 Hz and be generous with the long reverb send.
Put the pad above the lead in the voicing, not underneath. Two notes up high beat a five-note chord every time. The pads and atmospheres guide walks through the envelope shapes properly.
Plucks
One oscillator, short decay, zero sustain, and a lot of delay. Dial in a dotted eighth with feedback near 40 percent and let the repeats do the rhythmic work. Delay panned wide, dry signal dead centre.
Tie the pluck’s filter cutoff to velocity and any pattern you write gets dynamics without extra effort. The modulation guide shows the velocity routing in the mod matrix.
Tempo, groove and arrangement
120–126 BPM, with 122 to 124 being home for most of the genre. Go under 120 and you’re sliding into organic house territory; push past 126 and the drive starts flattening the emotion.
Keep the groove straight and let percussion handle every bit of syncopation. Movement comes from shakers and toms while the kick holds down the four.
Here’s an arrangement habit worth copying: build the breakdown before anything else. In this style the breakdown IS the track; the drops only exist to frame it. If it doesn’t hit you with the drums muted, no structural cleverness is going to rescue it.
Most tracks run 6–8 minutes: a patient first act, a breakdown landing around 3:30, then a closing drop that introduces one element you haven’t heard before.
Mixing notes for melodic house and techno
Keep everything mono below 120 Hz. Above 300 Hz, go as wide as you want; few genres reward width like this one.
Sidechain the sub hard against the kick, release around 100 ms, and sidechain your reverb returns against the lead. Ducking a reverb against its own source is honestly the one move that separates amateur mixes from professional ones in this style.
Cut 300–500 Hz out of the pads. Mud collects there, and nothing this genre cares about lives in that band anyway.
And leave headroom. A melodic track typically gets mastered 2 to 3 dB below peak time techno levels, because the contrast between breakdown and drop is the whole point.
Common mistakes
Too much harmony. Stack four-note chords in every part and the mid-range turns to soup. Let one part carry the chord while everything else sticks to one or two notes.
The breakdown is too short. Sixteen bars doesn’t count. Give it 32 or 64 so the tension actually has room to build.
No dry signal. A common beginner move is burying the lead in reverb until the attack disappears. Keep the dry channel present and run the reverb on a send you can duck.
Ignoring the drums. Since melody drives the track, it’s tempting to leave stock drums untouched. Don’t. Layer the kick and clap at minimum, and give the percussion an actual groove.
When you outgrow the freebies
These 14 patches were designed in the same sessions as my Serum 2 preset bundles, which collect entire genres for less than buying the packs one by one.
Prefer browsing by sound instead? The whole Serum 2 preset catalog lives in one place.
FAQ
Do these presets work in Serum 1?
No. They’re built on the Serum 2 engine. Serum 2 is a free update if you already own Serum.
Are they royalty-free?
Yes. Use them in releases, client work, tracks you sell, no credit needed. The only restriction: you can’t resell or redistribute the preset files themselves.
What key works best for melodic house and techno?
Minor keys: A minor, F minor and C minor come up most often. Honestly the voicing matters more than the key: bass root down low, chords up high.
How do I get that Afterlife-style huge reverb without losing clarity?
Run the reverb as a send, highpass the return at 300 Hz, then sidechain the return against the dry signal. The wash only shows up in the gaps, which is exactly where you want it.
My track sounds empty in the drop even with everything playing — what is missing?
Mid-range, nearly every time. Slip in a quiet, wide layer between 500 Hz and 2 kHz (a filtered noise loop, or a low-level pluck doubling the lead an octave higher) and the drop fills in without getting any louder.
I run Monosounds.studio and make the packs myself. Ten-plus years of producing, 97+ releases, 16,000+ downloads. Every Serum 2 preset we ship passes a CPU check on a mid-range laptop and gets used in a real track before release. If it does not survive a mix, it does not go in the pack.
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